


Chrome

by Seneschal



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Drabble, Gen, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve isn't handling the future very well
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-04 07:54:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3015758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Seneschal/pseuds/Seneschal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve and the future. He's not as impressed as SHIELD might prefer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chrome

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not even sure how to tag this really except that it's very stream of consciousness, and I have NOT edited it. I will probably go back and proofread tomorrow or the day after, I just wanted to write it and get it out. I just chose a word and a character and went with it. If you have any prompts for shorts, let me know. :) I need to write more.
> 
> Also, I tried doing this present-tense, but may have failed in places. If you see any errors, please let me know. Thanks!! Except for the silly errors like internets and tumblers and such. :D That was deliberate, because my headcanon is that Steve would make those old-fogey mistakes (pokemans, anyone?) at first, and then just keep using the words wrong to troll people like Tony and Darcy and Clint. >:3

The future is made of chrome. 

Steve spends a lot of time watching the world go by outside his window. He watches the cars, the people, the flashing lights and the never-ending bustle of the city that never sleeps. Sometimes he watches them from his SHIELD-provided apartment; others he watches them as he walks in the streets, slow and ambling compared to the brisk hurry of the other pedestrians, the cars, the bicyclists. He walks the same streets he grew up in seventy years ago, and thinks it's funny, but for all that he grew up here, he couldn't feel less at home.

Steve doesn't think he'll ever get used to the new New York. It was never a bright place in his time, as much as Hollywood liked to glamorize it then, or maybe Steve just never got to see that side of the city, the clean parts, the safe parts. Maybe for some people, it really had been as flashy, as glamorous as the now-old monochrome photographs and film reels he sometimes looks through in fits of nostalgia: Howard Stark had certainly seemed to fit into that kind of a world. Maybe Steve had just never seen that side of the city, back then. His home wasn't so shiny and bright. Home, for Steve, has always been brownstone buildings dirty with heavy black soot from coal-smoke and dirty brown slush in shallow ditches alongside the road, trash piled up in places and hard-off folks smoking on street corners and sharing burn-barrels for heat in the bleak winter.

The future presents itself to him as bright, flashy, fast. So very modern. Nothing's swanky if it's not sleek and shiny and new-new-new, newer and better and more brilliant than anything before it, and fantastically futuristic things become out-of-date faster than Steve could ever have believed. In a lot of ways, the future really is just as great as everybody tells him it is, as everybody believes it is. Society has changed so much, and so much of it is just--better. Dames--women--working jobs with as much respect and almost as much pay as men. Coloreds--African-American--and other minority groups are equals. There's more information available to anyone than Steve ever would have thought could even exist, and more of it being discovered every day! How could Steve not be amazed by all these things? But.

There's always a but, a catch, and that's something Steve learned real early on, living how and where and when he did. No matter how shiny the chrome is, you gotta look for the grime, for the rust, for the dirty tricks hiding under the bright-pretty-shiny. Turns out, that holds true for the future as much as it did back then. Steve didn't even have to look too far or hard to find the seedy underside of all that bright happy perfect chrome. 

Yeah, sure, there's more than enough food for everybody now. Grocery stores are amazing these days, with more variety than Steve ever woulda saw back then--but then there's still kids starving. Not just overseas and out-of-sight-out-of-mind, but right here in America, where people tell him is the center of the world economy, land of the free, home of the brave. They tell him all about how great America is, how much good they do, how much better they are than the rest of the world, but nobody has an answer when he asks if they're so great then why are kids still going hungry here? Why are there young ladies on street corners in bright pretty too-small clothes and too-high heels dolled up in makeup that still doesn't quite hide the despair in their eyes? Why do people still say and do hateful things to one another just because of the color of a fellow's skin, or the God he prays (or doesn't pray, and ain't that a thing) to? Nobody has an answer for any of those questions that amounts to anything other than 'cause that's the way it is', and Steve's never been able to just accept bullying and hate and inequality because it's the status quo. It always used to get him in trouble, and Bucky always told him it'd get him killed one day (but never stop, Steve-o, you wouldn't be you if you had a lick of sense in that head of yours) and maybe it will, but Steve has always thought that'd be a fine reason to get himself killed, making things just that little bit better, that little bit more fair.

The thing about the future is you don't have to look far to find the grime the chrome's trying to hide. Sometimes it seems that under all the new technology and amazing things there are all around, the future ain't much different from back home. Just...newer, maybe. A weird mix between shying away from all the ugly in the world and plastering it in lurid technicolor all over the place in horrible, jarring contrast to the rich excesses of the world, making it into some kind of stark display of everything depraved in the world and treating it like it's nothing, or worse--making a joke of it.

Steve doesn't think he could ever treat the horrible inequalities of the world, the tragedies and the abominations of human nature and development with the callous disregard and near-humor people in the future seem to, like they're so far above it that none of it can touch them, just drip off the shiny impervious shield of their ultra-HD plasma LED flatscreen televisions and their i-pods and their tablets and their fast cars and their tumblers and twitters and their face-pages. 

A lot of days, the future disgusts him. It's all chrome, alright. It's shiny and it's clean and it's polished to an obsessive reflective sheen, but it's all fake. All that chrome doesn't mean a thing when it's just varnish layered thick over all the same problems just twisted up and tied into brand new shapes. 

Steve hates the future less in the rain. It's darker, then, the light not reflecting as sharply, the colors nor standing out as starkly, and all the people and the buildings are just that much duller, that much more drab. Rain transforms the city sometimes into something that's almost familiar, and it suits his mood often, in the first few months after waking up in that fake hospital room. He learns how to use the internets to find the weather, and he makes sure to be outside in a battered leather jacket he pulled out of a $4 bin at some resale shop he found the first few weeks after waking up here, hands in the deep pockets and lapels turned up against the water whenever he can. There's something soothing about it, the way the streets empty out and the sounds of the city are dulled under the hiss of water hitting concrete and brick and glass. Rain sounds the same, even in the future, and people hurry the same, heads down, shoulders hunched. That's comforting. The dim lighting makes the city less fake for all that it turns it into a drab world of smudges of gray-on-charcoal-on-brown, but it's a dismal atmosphere reminiscent of home, and is comforting to Steve. 

Steve walks the rainy streets until the sky's pitch black and the streetlights are dismal yellow cones of flickering light dotted by swift streaks of water, puddles dark and muddy. Soaked to the bone, steaming in the cold, he watches the rain fall in the dimly lit city and thinks about all the ways things have changed, and all the ways they really, really haven't.


End file.
